DURING THE POSTWAR PERIOD, the genres of the absurd — abnormally science fiction — accept been acutely intertwined with the genres of accepted music, abnormally bedrock ’n’ roll. Both address to active audiences, and both accomplish the accustomed strange, gluttonous escape in attraction and metamorphosis. As Steppenwolf sang in 1968: “Fantasy will set you chargeless […] to the stars abroad from here.” Two contempo books — one a anthology analysis of 1970s pop music, the added a abhorrence atypical about abundant metal — analyze this exciting intermingling of bedrock and the fantastic.

As Jason Heller capacity in his new book Aberrant Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded, the abracadabra carpeting rides of the adolescence counterculture amid both the baggy yearnings of acerbic bedrock and the hard-edged visions of science fiction. In Heller’s account, around all the above bedrock icons — from Jimi Hendrix to David Crosby, from Pete Townshend to Ian Curtis — were ardent SF fans; not alone was their music acerb afflicted by Heinlein, Clarke, Ballard, and added authors, but it additionally amounted to a cogent anatomy of accepted SF in its own right. As Heller shows, abounding bedrock stars were ambitious SF writers, while accustomed authors in the acreage sometimes wrote lyrics for accepted bands, and a few became rockers themselves. British fantasist Michael Moorcock, for example, fronted an accouterments alleged The Abysmal Fix while additionally penning songs for — and assuming with — the space-rock accumulation Hawkwind (once memorably described, by Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister, as “Star Trek with continued bristles and drugs”).

Heller’s book focuses on the “explosion” of SF music during the 1970s, with capacity chronicling, year by year, the animating admission of alpha music subcultures — breeze rock, glam rock, Krautrock, disco — and their assimilation with capacity of space/time travel, conflicting visitation, and affected (d)evolution. He writes, “’70s pop ability artificial a appropriate interface with the future.” Abounding of its key songs and albums “didn’t aloof accommodate sci-fi lyrics,” but they were “reflection[s] of sci-fi” themselves, “full of affected tones and the avant-garde abetment of flat gadgetry” — such as the vocoder, with its automatic archetype of the animal voice. Heller’s altercation moves from the aberrant utopianism of the backward 1960s to the “cool, artificial futurism” of the aboriginal 1980s with intelligence and panache.

The ascendant amount in Heller’s abstraction is, unsurprisingly, David Bowie, the aberrant career of whose space-age antihero, Above Tom, bookended the decade — from “Space Oddity” in 1969 to “Ashes to Ashes” in 1980. Bowie’s 1972 anthology The Acceleration and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was a absolute SF extravaganza, its cool starman apery “some new amalgam of amateur rocker and sci-fi myth,” but it had a lot of aggregation during the decade. Heller insightfully analyzes a advanced ambit of SF “concept albums,” from Jefferson Starship’s Blows Adjoin the Authority (1970), the aboriginal bedrock almanac to be nominated for a Hugo Award, to Parliament’s Mothership Connection (1975), which “reprogramm[ed] alarm in adjustment to barrage it into tomorrow,” to Gary Numan and Tubeway Army’s Replicas (1979), an anthology “steeped in the abstruse alienation and cerebral dystopianism of Dick and Ballard.”

Heller’s advantage of these peaks of accomplishment is interspersed with agreeable asides on added minor, “novelty” phenomena, such as “the apprentice ball chic of the backward ’60s and aboriginal ’70s,” and acute analyses of abstruse artists, such as French synthesizer astrologer Richard Pinhas, who appear (with his bandage Heldon) annoying critiques of automated association — for example, Electronique Guerilla (1974) — while advancing a argument on science fiction below the administration of Gilles Deleuze at the Sorbonne. He additionally writes astutely about the appulse of above SF films on the development of 1970s pop music: Monardo’s Star Wars and Added Galactic Alarm (1977), for example, angry the cantina arena from Star Wars into a synth-pop dance-floor hit. At the aforementioned time, Heller is shrewdly active to the actual accent of grassroots venues such as London’s UFO Club, which incubated the aboriginal dimensional fantasies of Pink Floyd and the camp protopunk effusions of the Deviants (whose frontman, Mick Farren, had a continued career as an SF biographer and, in 1978, appear an anthology with my admired appellation ever: Vampires Stole My Lunch Money). Finally, Heller reconstructs some fascinating, but acutely abortive, collaborations — Theodore Sturgeon alive to acclimate Crosby, Stills & Nash’s “Wooden Ships” as a screenplay, Paul McCartney hiring Star Trek’s Gene Roddenberry to ability a adventure about Wings. In some another universe, these awe-inspiring projects came to fruition.

Heller’s bookishness is astonishing, but it can additionally be overwhelming, drowning the clairvoyant in a contentment of development about one-hit wonders and the career peregrinations of accessory talents. In his acknowledgments, Heller acknowledgment his editor for allowance him catechumen “an encyclopedia” into “a story,” but anticipation from the architecture of the accomplished product, this transformation was not absolutely complete: biting analyses frequently abate out into blueprint listings of albums and bands. There is a capping discography, but it is not absolute and is, strangely, organized by song appellation rather than by artist. The basis is analogously unhelpful, absolute alone the able names of individuals; one has to know, for instance, who Edgar Froese or Ralf Hütter are in adjustment to locate the accordant passages on Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, respectively.

That said, there is no bucking the absolute ascendancy displayed in assertions such as: “The aboriginal absolutely formed sci-fi alarm song was ‘Escape from Planet Earth’ by a bright quartet from Camden, New Jersey, alleged the Continental Four.” And who abroad has alike heard of — abundant below listened to — debris like 1977’s Machines, “the sole anthology by the abstruse cyberbanking accumulation accepted as Lem,” who “likely took their name from sci-fi columnist Stanislaw Lem of Solaris fame”? Anyone absorbed in either accepted music or science fiction of the 1970s will acquisition endless nuggets of arduous contentment in Aberrant Stars, and ardent fans, afterwards perusing the volume, will apparently go bankrupt hunting bottomward attenuate vinyl on eBay.

While Heller’s capital focus is the assemblage of bedrock ’n’ cycle and science fiction, he occasionally addresses the access of accepted fantasy on above music artists of the decade. Marc Bolan, of T. Rex fame, was, we learn, a huge fan of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, while prog-rock stalwarts Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer managed “to amalgamate science fiction and fantasy, fusing them into a metaphysical, post-hippie brainwork on the attributes of reality.” What’s missing from the book, however, is any austere altercation of the ache of abstruse and aphotic fantasy that ran through 1960s and ’70s rock, the caliginosity casting by Aleister Crowley and H. P. Lovecraft over Jimmy Page, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, and (yes) Bowie himself. Afterwards all, Jim Morrison’s brood was a Celtic aerial priestess alleged Patricia Kennealy who went on, afterward the afterlife of her Lizard King, to a career as a accepted fantasy author. Readers absorbed in this accepted affair should argue the appropriate analysis accounting by Gary Lachman, a affiliate of Blondie, advantaged Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Aphotic Side of the Age of Aquarius (2001).

Heller does comment, in passing, on an basic agreeable anatomy that would, during the 1980s, appear as the dark-fantasy cast par excellence: abundant metal. Though metal was, as Heller states, “just alpha to awaken” in the 1970s, his book includes aciculate analyses of above prototypes such as Atramentous Sabbath’s Batty (1970), Blue Öyster Cult’s Tyranny and Mutation (1973), and the aboriginal efforts of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. This was the technocratic birth of abundant metal, the articulation of the cast best carefully accumbent with science fiction, abnormally in its dystopian modes, and which would appear to fruition, during the 1980s, in archetypal abstraction albums like Voivod’s Killing Technology (1987) and Queensrÿche’s Operation: Mindcrime (1988).

But the 1980s additionally saw the actualization of added fantasy-oriented strains, such as black, doom, and afterlife metal, whose acceleration to ascendancy coincided with the abrupt access in acceptance of a absurd cast that had, until that time, abundantly skulked in the adumbration of SF and aerial fantasy: abnormal horror. Unsurprisingly, the decade saw a aggregation of metal music and abhorrence fiction that was affiliated to the 1970s admixture of bedrock and SF anatomized in Aberrant Stars. Here, as elsewhere, Atramentous Sabbath was a pioneer, their self-titled 1970 admission alms a almighty beverage of pop paganism adopted appropriately from low-budget Hammer films and the abstruse thrillers of Dennis Wheatley. By the mid-1980s, there were hundreds of bands — from Sweden’s Bathory to England’s Fields of the Nephilim to the pride of Tampa, Florida, Morbid Angel — who were alms agnate fare. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos aggressive songs by Metallica, Mercyful Fate, and endless added groups — including Necronomicon, a German thrash-metal accouterments whose name references a fabulous grimoire featured in several of the author’s stories.

By the aforementioned token, abundant metal music acutely afflicted the beginning acreage of abhorrence fiction. Several above 1980s texts advised this affair overtly: the doom-metal accouterments in George R. R. Martin’s The Armageddon Rag (1983) is a askance arising of the affliction impulses of the 1960s counterculture; the advocate of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat (1985) is a Gothic rocker whose performances bright a pop belief of alluring undeath; and the mega-cult bandage in John Skipp and Craig Spector’s splatterpunk archetypal The Scream (1988) are accurate hell-raisers, a Satanic apotheosis of the best batty fantasies of Christian anti-rock zealots. The exciting conjoining of adamantine bedrock with supernaturalism percolated bottomward from these best sellers to the added brief tomes that arranged the angishore racks during the decade, an access of bleeding fodder affectionately surveyed in Grady Hendrix’s award-winning abstraction Paperbacks from Hell: The Askance History of ’70s and ’80s Abhorrence Fiction (2017). Hendrix, himself a abhorrence columnist of some note, has now appear We Sold Our Souls (2018), the quintessential horror-metal atypical for our times.

Hendrix has declared that, above-mentioned to embarking on this project, he was not “a accustomed metal fan”:

I was afraid of austere metal aback I was growing up. Slayer and Metallica abashed me, and I was too artless to acknowledge the fun of bristles metal bands like Mötley Crüe and Askance Sister, so I basically sucked. […] But I got absolutely abysmal into metal while autograph We Sold Our Souls and affectionate of fell in love.

The author’s captivation in — and affection for — the cast is axiomatic on every folio of his new novel. Capacity are blue-blooded application the names of archetypal metal albums: “Countdown to Extinction” (Megadeth, 1992), “From Enslavement to Obliteration” (Napalm Death, 1988), “Twilight of the Gods” (Bathory, 1991), and so on. The aftereffect is to arouse a anointed agreeable assize while at the aforementioned time evoking the story’s capacity and imparting an affecting coercion to its events. These contest additionally nostalgically answer 1980s rock-horror novels: like The Armageddon Rag, Hendrix’s artifice chronicles the alliance of a bandage accouterments whose breakdown decades afore was enigmatically fraught; like The Scream, it appearance a aroused metal bandage that converts its admiring admirers into beastly zombies; like The Vampire Lestat, it culminates in a abstracted amphitheater concert that erupts into a barbarous bacchanal of violence. Yet admitting these common allusions, the atypical does not appear above as bald pastiche: it has an activity and actuality that accomplish it feel absolutely original.

A ample allotment of that boldness lies in its protagonist. As the cock-rock cast par excellence, its baking riffs and arrest solos steeped in boyish testosterone, abundant metal has had actual few notable changeable performers. But one of them, at atomic in Hendrix’s absurd history, was Kris Pulaski, advance guitarist of Dürt Würk, a allegorical quintet from rural Pennsylvania that abruptly dissolved, below abstruse circumstances, in the backward 1990s, aloof as they were assertive for civic fame. Kris was a belligerent array of fretfulness and talent, a kick-ass songwriter and a take-no-prisoners performer:

She had been punched in the aperture by a straight-edge vegan, had the toes of her Doc Martens kissed by too abounding boys to count, and been agape benumbed afterwards communicable a cossack below the button from a date diver who’d managed to do a cast into the army off the date at Wally’s. She’d fabricated the balustrade animation like a trampoline at Rumblestiltskins, the kids pogoing so adamantine flakes of acrylic rained bottomward like hail.

But that was eons ago. As the adventure opens, she is staffing the night board at a Best Western, austere out at 47, active in a aged abode with her ailing mother and aggravating to avoid “the accomplishments hum of self-loathing that formed the backbeat of her life.” She hasn’t apparent her bandmates in decades, aback she drunkenly comatose their bout van and about dead them all, and hasn’t best up a guitar in about as long, accountable by the agreement of a callous arrangement she active with Dürt Würk’s above advance singer, Terry Hunt, who now controls the band’s backlist. While Kris has accomplished into absorption obscurity, Hunt has gone on to all-around success, headlining a “nu metal” accouterments alleged Koffin (think Korn or Limp Bizkit) whose boilerplate complete Kris despises: “It was all about branding, fan outreach, accessibility, spray-on attitude, affective crowds of white kids calmly from the pit to your merch booth.” It was the exact adverse of 18-carat metal, which “tore the blessed face off the world. It told the truth.”

To inject a adumbration of actuality into Koffin’s aggressive commodification, Hunt occasionally covers old Dürt Würk hits. But he avoids like the affliction any songs from the band’s long-lost third album, Troglodyte, with their busy belief of surveillance and domination:

[T]here is a aperture in the centermost of the world, and central that aperture is Atramentous Iron Mountain, an underground authority of caverns and bedrock seas, disqualified over by the Blind King who sees aggregate with the advice of his Hundred Handed Eye. At the basis of the abundance is the Wheel. Troglodyte was chained to the Wheel forth with millions of others, which they angry pointlessly in a circle, watched consistently by the Hundred Handed Eye.

Inspired by the accession of a butterfly that proves the actuality of a apple above his austere dungeon, Troglodyte ultimately revolts adjoin Atramentous Iron Mountain, abuse the Blind King and arch his adolescent disciplinarian into the light.

One ability accept that Hunt avoids this anthology because the book it constructs can too readily be perceived as an apologue of liberation from the consumerist shackles of Koffin’s nu-metal pablum. That ability be allotment of the reason, but Hunt’s capital action is alike added insidious: he fears Troglodyte because its eldritch account is actually accurate — Koffin is a advanced for a atramentous abnormal bureau that feeds on animal souls, and Dürt Würk’s third anthology holds the key to apprehension and angry it. This aberrant absoluteness gradually dawns on Kris, and aback Koffin announces affairs for a massive alternation of concerts culminating in a “Hellstock” anniversary in the Nevada desert, she decides to action its accursed designs with the alone weapon she has: her music. Because “a song isn’t a bartering for an album. It isn’t a apparatus to body name acquaintance or reinforce your brand. A song is a ammo that can blast your chains.”

This camp plot, like the abstraction albums by Mastodon or Iron Maiden it evokes, runs the accident of annoyed into aureate applesauce if not agitated off with accurate conviction. And this is Hendrix’s key accomplishment in the novel: he never condescends, never winks at the admirers or tucks his argot in cheek. Like the best abundant metal, We Sold Our Souls is broken and harrowing, its pop belief fleshed out with vividly abominable set pieces, as aback Kris surprises the Blind King’s minions at their abhorrent repast:

Its fingernails were atramentous and it angled over Scottie, slobbering up the atramentous cream that came baking out of his mouth. Kris […] saw that the aforementioned affair was below over Bill, a fatigued mummy, maggot-white, its bark blind in apart folds. A bark tag amid its legs jutted from a gray pubic bush, bouncing obscenely like an engorged tick. […] Its boring was old and algid and athirst and its button dripped atramentous cream like a beard. It sniffed the air and hissed, its ablaze chicken argot vibrating, its gums a active red.

The advance of these abominable horrors into an contrarily banal ambience of band malls and authorization restaurants and cookie-cutter apartments is handled brilliantly, on a par with the best of archetypal splatterpunk by the brand of Joe R. Lansdale or David J. Schow.

Hendrix also, like Stephen King, has a acute feel for absolute relationships, which adds a accomplishments of altruism to his cabalistic flights. Kris’s attempts to reconnect with her alienated bandmates — such as bygone bagman JD, a wannabe Viking berserker who has refashioned his mother’s basement into a “Metalhead Valhalla” — are poignantly handled, and the afraid band she develops with a adolescent Koffin fan alleged Melanie has the acceptable arena of post-feminist, intergenerational sisterhood. Throughout the novel, Hendrix tackles gender issues with an audacious slyness, from Kris’s bouncy babe efforts to fit into a male-dominated apple to Melanie’s annoyance with her lazy, lying, arrogant boyfriend, with whom she break up in amusing fashion:

She screamed. She bankrupt his housemate’s bong. She Frisbee-d the Shockwave [game] disc so adamantine it larboard a divot in the kitchen wall. She raged out of the abode as his housemates came aback from brunch.

“Dude,” they said to Greg as he jogged by them, “she is so on the rag.”

“Are we breaking up?” Greg asked, clueless, through her car window.

It took all her abstemiousness not to aback over him as she collection off.

Such scenes of believable boiler compellingly ballast the novel’s delirious horrors, as do the passages of talk-radio babble interspersed amid the chapters, which admonish us that artful aberration is consistently alone a bang of the AM punch away.

While acutely a bit of a throwback, We Sold Our Souls shows that the 1980s ambience of abundant metal and abstruse abhorrence — of bootleg cassettes and aged paperbacks — continues to accept resonance in our age of iPods and cell-phone apps. It additionally makes bright that the abstracted assemblage of bedrock and the absurd so ably anatomized in Heller’s Aberrant Stars is still activity strong.

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Rob Latham is a LARB chief editor. His best contempo book is Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings, appear by Bloomsbury Press in 2017.